UNOFFICIAL SCORERAstros could benefit from a bit more thievery

Published 5:30 am, Sunday, March 23, 2008

Despite regularly drawing the eye of the pitcher during his 2007 season with the Phillies, Astros outfielder Michael Bourn stole 18 bases in 19 attempts (95 percent).

Despite regularly drawing the eye of the pitcher during his 2007 season with the Phillies, Astros outfielder Michael Bourn stole 18 bases in 19 attempts (95 percent).

Photo: Karen Warren, Houston Chronicle

Levine: More steals could benefit Astros

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What if a football team made calling the coin toss a training camp priority? Or an MLS team spent the winter upgrading its goal celebrations? Or a baseball team made one of its spring training points of emphasis stolen bases?

I mean, how meaningless can you get?

OK, just kidding about the last one, but only after a close look at the numbers.

Through the acquisition of speedsters Michael Bourn and Kaz Matsui, and the hiring of Gary Redus as a baserunning consultant, the Astros have made activity on the basepaths a priority in their preparations for the season.

It's not exactly the fashionable play. More like retro-chic.

It wasn't long ago — 1985 to be exact — that the St. Louis Cardinals had five players steal 31 or more bases as the team swiped 314. Twenty years later, the Athletics, under the guidance of general manager and anti-theft activist Billy Beane, honored the anniversary by duplicating that number.

Not the 314, the 31.

As home run numbers rose through the 1990s and as the attitude caught on that outs were the currency of baseball that was to be protected, the steal numbers plunged.

In 2005, when stolen bases bottomed out at 86 per team on average, you could have taken six teams' totals and not reached 314.

Theft on the rise

The number has been on the rise since then, with teams stealing an average 92 bases in 2006 and 98 in 2007. But the Astros have been a little late getting with the times. They have fallen short of those numbers with 79 and, after the departure of
Willy Taveras
, 65 in 2007.

Not that it matters.

As it turns out, using the data from the dozen full seasons since the end of the strike, there is no correlation between a team's stolen base total and the number of runs that team scores, adjusted for American League versus National League.

Where there is a correlation is how wisely that currency is spent. In other words, a team's stolen base percentage (steals/attempts) is correlated with how many runs the team scores.

And that's where the Astros could use improvement.

Steal with caution

Astros baserunners were safe on only 66 percent of their stolen base attempts last year, considerably below the major league average of 74 percent. The year before, they were still slightly south of MLB's
average of 71 percent with their 69.

Enter Bourn and eventually Matsui. Despite regularly drawing the eye of the pitcher during his 2007 season with the Phillies, Bourn stole 18 bases in 19 attempts (95 percent). Matsui stole a career-high 32 bases for the National League champion Rockies in 36 attempts (88.9 percent) last year.

Those numbers mean that by any reasonable estimate, stolen bases at the top of the lineup would be generally positive gambles.

Here's one estimate.

Using data from the first half of the decade, according to Retrosheet.org, the average stolen base created added .178 runs to the expectation for that inning; the average caught stealing cost a team .441. Obviously this number would be different based on game situation (much higher when trailing late in the game), but the cutoff for a wise decision would be approximately a 71.2 percent success rate.

Additions will be key

If the number is lower, like the 2007 Astros, the average steal attempt would probably cost the team more than it helped.

But if the number is higher, as will be the case if Bourn and Matsui keep up their 2007 pace, the steal becomes a positive weapon.